It seems that I’m not the only one who finds the tinsel of an operating system GUI distracting when I’m trying to concentrate on some work. While many Linux distributions allow you to fullscreen a Terminal window, Mac OS X’s Terminal.app does not provide you with such an option. Although I did (briefly) consider rebooting into single-user mode (which starts OS X with a BSD shell), it seemed like a better idea to try and find out if anybody has already had the same thought as I, which led me to a great solution over at http://www.hccp.org

In order to enact this process yourself you’ll need X11 and the Mac OS X Developer tools installed.

Knowing basic *nix terminal commands is an absolute must for any computer pro. Whether you use Windows, Mac OS or Linux, you’re bound to face the command prompt at some stage, so here’s my crash course in CLI. In Part 4, I’ll introduce some command line tools which cover some of the most common and most useful functions in Unix.

Really Useful Unix Command Line Tools

Unix operating systems come as standard with a number of very helpful command-line tools which perform very common and very useful file and and administration functions quickly and easily. Here’s a list of some oft-used programs:

System Monitor – top

top provides a real-time updated list of the top processes running on your Unix system. It is similar in function to ‘Task Manager’ on Windows and ‘Activity Monitor’ on Mac OS X. To quit ‘top’, press ‘q’.

Another optional extra you might want to consider when hosting multiple sites, or just when working with subdomains, is a custom error page.

Using the more basic configurations detailed in previoustutorials, you may occasionally find odd results being returned to your clients. For example, if someone were to simply type your server’s IP into their browser, or spelled a subdomain incorrectly, Apache2 will serve them up the first site it finds in its configuration path. If you’re hosting multiple sites, this means that a totally different site might be returned, which doesn’t exactly look professional.

Here, I’ll show you how to easily counter this problem, by creating a custom error page for your server.

[If you’re not familiar with Apache configuration files, read one of the tutorials linked above for more info.]

Step One

Create your custom error page and save it as ‘index.html’. In this example, we’re going to create the ‘index.html’ file at /home/randymarsh/errorpage/index.html.

This page could just be an image or some text, or you can write a redirect to one of your hosted sites or their subdomains. As long as it’s called ‘index.html’, you can do what you want here.